The present invention relates to techniques for collecting, organizing, analyzing, and displaying information from hierarchical multidimensional data sets, and in particular, to systems and methods for improved consumption models for summary analytics.
Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In business, analysis of past, present, and future performance is a critical task. A multitude of business-data collection, mining, and analysis products exists for the complex task of evaluating a business's performance, planning for future operations, setting targets, and projecting possible scenarios, conditions, and outcomes. Such products usually involve data stores, such as databases, and the combination of hardware and software for accessing, querying, updating, and analyzing various types of business data stored in the data stores.
For example, businesses, and indeed whole industries, exist around providing enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications to businesses of all sizes. Such ERP applications come in a variety of styles and structures, and can include various types and numbers of constituents applications. Each constituent application can be designed to implements a specific type of analysis geared towards assisting one or more aspects of a business organization. As an example, an ERP application can include both the general ledger accounting program as well as a sales and operations planning (S&OP) program to collect, analyze, plan, and project financials, sales, operations of a particular business.
While such highly complex and comprehensive applications, such as an ERP application, exist, the manner in which the information contained in such applications is presented to a user varies greatly. To simplify the consumption of such information, various forms of alphanumeric and graphical analytics displayed in a “dashboard” or home screen have been developed. Analytical applications generate complex bar graphs, pie charts, bullet charts, line graphs, line graphs, and many other types of graphic and hybrid alphanumeric-graphic visual representation of the data have been devised to quickly and concisely convey the analytic information to a user. While each type of visual representation has its associated advantages and strengths for showing various aspects of the analytics, devising the most efficient way to quickly view and consume such data and implement it in a computer generated visual representation of the analytic remains a specialized skill. Most business users, save for some technically trained analyst, are not skilled in the techniques of devising meaningful analytics and concise metrics from vast amounts of data and the generating a visual representation of such summary analytics and metrics for quick and easy comprehension. The tasks of devising metrics and devising visual representations is further complicated by the task of inserting the generated visual representations into a easily navigable dashboard or monitoring and light analysis user interface.
For instance, a user may know what information they would like to see, however, they may lack the programming expertise to construct the appropriate computer executable code, let alone the design expertise to organize the numerical results into an efficient visual representation. To lessen the burden of quickly producing easily understood business analysis on business users, many products exist that provide users with prepackaged analysis with predefined visual representations. Such solutions, however, do not allow users to easily customize analysis views or view analysis or metrics and the resulting visual representations constructed by other users.
Thus, there is a need for improved systems and methods for generation and consumption models for summary analytics. The present invention solves these and other problems by providing systems and methods that provide a structured framework for generating and displaying discrete analysis digest comprising graphical and alphanumeric information according to a predetermined analysis digest specification.